At Vigo, Off the Coast of Spain
Chapter III Some Confessions and a Few Morals
At six o’clock the next morning a small, depressed-looking procession wended its way to the quay, followed by the sidelong glances and whispered comments of the fish-market fraternity.
It was the noble army of dream merchants setting forth on its quest. And why depressed? I do not know, except that, personally, on the eve of any problematical undertaking I feel that way, and so, apparently, do others. Perhaps it was that the enthusiasm of ignorance had momentarily deserted us, and we were awed by a rational glimpse of the task that lay ahead. Such moods vanish the instant one gets down to work, the great panacea, but until then they crouch on the shoulders, a dour company.
In silence we rowed out to the dream ship, and hoisted sail. I was going to say that in silence we lowered the dinghy on to its chocks, but, as a fact, the keel descended on the Skipper’s toe, extracting a shout of anguish from that usually restrained mariner.
Almost simultaneously, and for no apparent reason, Steve took an involuntary seat on the open skylight, which shut with a crash on one of his fingers.
The moorings were cast off prematurely, and, getting under way on the wrong tack, we sailed, with the utmost precision, into a neighbouring fishing-smack, nearly breaking our bowsprit.
I could imagine the grinning heads of the fisher folk lining the breakwater wall.
“They be goin’ ter the South Sea Islands, they be!” I could almost hear them saying, and dived below to show them what a motor auxiliary could do. There were one hundred and fifty vessels moored in that harbour, and I should not like to say how many we fouled during the next half hour. Indeed I could not, for throughout the process I was wrestling with the engine, which refused to budge—until we had rounded the breakwater, and there was no further use for it. Such is the way of these necessary evils aboard a sailing ship.
Coming on deck, I was confronted with a sorry spectacle. Our port light-board was in splinters. Relics of vessels we had caressed in parting littered the deck. The Skipper was in the steering well, with the tiller in one hand and his toe in the other; and Peter was administering iodine and lint to Steve’s crushed finger.
“She goes!” I triumphed, tactlessly referring to my Herculean labours with the engine.
“D’you think it’s broken?” demanded the Skipper, extending an enormous, bootless foot.
“Flat as a pancake,” muttered Steve.
Which gives a fair idea of the trend of individual thought on occasions.
But at long last we were off! Off before a seven-knot nor’-wester, and with only twelve thousand miles to go! What else mattered?
By the time we had picked up an intermittent pallor on the horizon that was Ushant light at a distance of thirty miles, the wind had strengthened to half a gale, and there was nothing the dream ship loved more dearly than half a gale on the quarter. In a series of exhilarating swoops, it flung her down into the Bay of Biscay; but what she did not like was being left there to roll helplessly in a windless swell. I have to call it a “swell,” just as I have to say we “rolled,” though neither word conveys our subsequent acrobatics in the least.
“The Bay” has an unsavoury reputation anyway, but for sheer unpleasantness commend me to the mood in which the dream ship made its acquaintance.
Literally from beam end to beam end we lurched. The engine was useless. Our propeller was out of the quarter, and under present circumstances as much out of the water as in it.
Any one aboard capable of sea-sickness, promptly was. The Skipper who, it must be confessed, had not been able to eat since setting sail, though he clung to his duties like a Stoic, was as near plaintive as I have ever seen him. Curiously enough, his malady took the form of conjuring visions of his good wife’s cooking. I honestly believe that if we had been able to produce the roast beef, cabbage, and “figgy dough” of his own home table, he would have eaten. But all we could offer him was bovril, tongue, and tinned asparagus. We did not know how to live, he assured us. On the schooner in the old days he had a stove, not one of these newfangled tin contraptions. And his wife cooked. And when she cooked, she cooked! Figgy dough that melted in the mouth.
At this juncture his audience was well advised to move to a safe distance.
In response to our eternal lurchings, ominous sounds began to filter up from below. A metallic click-clock, click-clock, a methodical thudding, a resounding crash. The first of these proved to be a kerosene tank that had come adrift from its rack fastenings, and threatened to fall on the engine. A galvanized iron receptacle containing seventy gallons of liquid is not the easiest of things to handle in a seaway, let alone with a crushed finger. My heart went out to Steve, but it was characteristic of the man that never a whimper escaped him. All that we could do was to wedge the tank into place with stout battens clean across the ship, which we did, and turned our attention to the next calamity. The piano had followed the example of the tank, and the wash-hand stand had emulated the piano; and rather than appear peculiar, a two-hundred-pound drum of treasured Scotch oatmeal was rolling on the floor, mingling its contents with the brine that oozed from a crate of salt pork wedged under the cabin table.
The crash was merely the dethronement of a lighted stove in the fo’c’s’le, on which Peter had been persisting for the last hour, and in spite of her own condition, in an attempt to produce something that the Skipper would eat.
On the whole, a healthy lesson in making all secure before sailing.
In the midst of our agonies below, a stentorian voice hailed us from the cockpit:
“All hands on deck! Lower mainsail!” Which was followed almost immediately by a “crack” like a pistol shot.
Our boom had snapped clean off about five feet from the end.
Such is “the Bay” in lightsome mood. Apparently the only article aboard unaffected by it was the chronometer, ticking placidly in its gimbals and bed of plush. There was something enviable about that chronometer.
The dawn brought with it a faint but steady breath, and discovering that there was sufficient boom left to set a double-reefed mainsail, we continued on our way, and a blessedly even keel, until toward evening we raised the coast of Spain.
The welcome and unmistakable smell of land came to us over the water, and presently the mouth of the Vigo River opened out, revealing a maze of leading lights.
The engine behaved itself, and by midnight the dream ship had anchored off the town, to an accompaniment of star shells and crackers.
It pleased us to imagine that these were our welcome, but as a fact the inevitable Spanish fiesta was in progress. We had made our first foreign port.